Title: A British and Italian case study on management philosophy

Authors: Claudia Rasicci, Claudio Vignali

Addresses: Dipartimento di Management e organizzazione aziendale, Facolta di Economia G. Fua, Universita Politecnica delle Marche, Piazzale Martelli 8, 60121 Ancona, Italy. ' Leslie Silver International Faculty, Tourism, Hospitality & Events School, Civic Quarter, LS1 3HE, Leeds, UK

Abstract: Six Sigma is a management philosophy that is strategic and disciplined, customer and process centric, data-driven, and represents a cross-functional approach to performance improvement aimed at the reduction of defects/errors from every product, process, and transaction. In this paper, a general introduction of the methodology is presented, including some basic characteristics, as the tools used for its development and the structure for its implementation. A comparison with other well known and recognised quality management systems has been done as well. In this second part, some of the most important cases of application of Six Sigma are presented.

Keywords: six sigma; customer satisfaction; total quality management; TQM; United Kingdom; UK; Italy; black belts; green belts; small and medium-sized enterprises; SMEs; management philosophy; quality improvement.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBG.2009.022610

International Journal of Business and Globalisation, 2009 Vol.3 No.2, pp.214 - 235

Published online: 18 Jan 2009 *

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